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Wednesday, May 24, 2017

The Omega Strain is Top 5 in North America!

I DID IT!

After four solid months of work, and many hundreds of hours of work (118 hours in April alone!) on my Omega Strain Genestealer Cult, I succeeded in not only scoring an Inner Circle gold medal at my local store, but also being named top army in Canada, and top 5 in North America!

Games Workshop US HQ made the announcement last Wednesday. It was a nail-biting wait, and they made the reveal by posting photos of the 5 winning armies to their Games Workshop Inner Circle Facebook page:

I can't properly explain how nerve-wracking the wait was between winning the gold medal on the Saturday, and getting the final results on the Wednesday. Throughout this whole contest, I had kept my sights firmly set on the grand prize: the all-expense paid trip to hang out with Games Workshop US HQ staff in Dallas. It was that end goal that kept me going as I poured hours into my display board and miniatures. And, after all that work, had I not succeeded in landing in the top five, I think I would have been very disappointed.

Fortunately that didn't happen, and I get to be THRILLED instead. This feels like a tremendous vindication of all the hard work, and I feel honoured to be among the top five winners (seriously, go check out Jake Beachboard's insane Admech floating fortress on his Twitter; the amount of plasticard he had to cut for it is INSANE).

I'm not really sure what else to say at this point other than I feel happy, vindicated, and tremendously lucky. I'm hoping I'll be able to put together something more cogent after my trip to Dallas on June 3rd...which just happens to coincide with the pre-order date for the new edition of 40k. Here's hoping that's a little more than a coincidence and part of our secret insider experience in Dallas is getting to mess around with the new edition!

Until then, here are some more photos of the cult. These are the ones I took myself on the Final Judgement day and were sent through to GW HQ for their final judging.

Amazing achievement, the whole Inner Circle event seems to have appeared from nowhere, hasn't happened here, not sure how it fits in with Armies on Parade. It seems like a competing event even if it is only in America. But to see the results come out the competition was really fierce and your cult is exceptional. Enjoy Dallas.

Yeah, Dave. It's been a little weird, and I only heard about it because I have an amazing GW store manager who is a great fan of my work. He singled me out and told me about the event before it started, as soon as he heard about it.

It was meant to be a test run by the American HQ, in support of Gathering Storm and as a run up to the new edition of 40k. I wouldn't say it competes with AoP because it's 6 months removed from that competition.

I wrote another post specifically on Inner Circle, and how it differs from Armies on Parade, if you're interested. Main differences that I really appreciated: it had a formal marking rubric for the armies that rewarded people who started a new army for this event, rather than people who just dusted off the same army they've been showing for years.

It was also great to have a rubric, that was marked by a GW employee. It meant that I was rewarded for all of my sculpting & conversion work and attention to painting, squad markings, stencils, etc. Armies on Parade is pretty much a popularity contest, voted by whoever wanders into GW that day. It is not, really, a judged event.

Thanks West! Yeah, reviewing the Facebook gallery on the Inner Circle page, there was some definite amazing entries there, and more than a few folks who were salty about their entry not scoring as high as someone else's. So many people put so much work into this, it makes me feel all the more honoured to be one of the top 5.

Thanks Naf! I really have little idea what to expect in Dallas. They claim they'll be showing us amazing things about the future of 40k. The dudes working at my GW thinks we're going to see stuff that hasn't even been leaked yet, but I'm assuming it's just going to be a 40k 8th preview...which isn't that amazing as it's virtually all been on Warhammer Community by this point.

We'll see, but I'm hoping I need to sign some big, thick NDAs to see some cool shiz I can't speak about.

Thanks Joe! I wish I could take some better photos of the display itself, but it's tough as it's a big box. I'll give it another go soon. The most common reaction I've gotten is "It's cool, and then you look closer, and you see even more detail." I feel like that's hard to put across on the internet.

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This is the hobby blog of Mr Pink, with the occassional interruption by his brother, Nuffsed. We create conversions of Games Workshop models (mostly) for Tyranids, Dark Eldar, Tau and Blood Angels (again, mostly). Mr Pink also offers tutorials on how to sculpt miniatures.

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